Crossposted from my more personal online journal: destiny

First, I apologize for not posting here more lately, even though there is no more pathetic a sight than someone apologizing for not posting in a blog. As it so often does, life responsibilities have interfered with my play of online chat games, and so I have had little to write about. I thought maybe something I wrote in my personal journey today might have a place here, though. Without further ado.

I know I haven't written anything intimate here for some time, but tonight was as near-perfect an evening as I could ever achieve, and I feel driven to chronicle it. Look here, now, as I use words like "chronicle". More on that later.
As anyone who still bothers with reading this online journal should know, in a month and some change I will be embarking on a new life journey. And, this time, a literal one. On nothing but tens of dollars and some baseless hopes, I am moving halfway across this nation to Portland, Oregon, a city of misfits and rejects such as myself. And as excited as I am, I am also terrified.
Until I was twelve years old, I moved every other year or more. In fact, by the time I was twelve, I had moved twelve times. Each new place I left I was forced to learn to adapt, and this is a trait that has served me well in life. But also in each new place I was forced to start over, to build up a new network of friends. And, all through my elementary school years, each new place I was also an outcast, as "new kids" often are. Oh, it is true, I made my friends here and there, several of whom are still my closest confidants today. But overall I was rejected by my peers, as many children are.
That all changed when I moved to the strange little town of Reedsburg, WI. Perhaps it was the burgeoning maturity that middle school brings on, or perhaps it was just the nature and environment of Sauk County, Wisconsin, but this place was the first place I was ever truly accepted, overall, by the other students. By my peers.
I did not realize this at first, of course. Until my middle school graduation, I still believed myself an outcast. Though I had friends and was finally generally popular with the other students, I believed in my heart of hearts that it was all a trick. In the night, before I slept, I told myself that I should not trust it, that behind my back the other students laughed amongst themselves and said, "Oh, that Jeff Bauer. He thinks we like him, isn't that hilarious? Isn't that the greatest mockery we could make of him?" For the three years of middle school I lived in dread and fear of the day I would overhear them mocking me, and it would all come crashing down.
It never did. Instead, middle school graduation occurred. For most people, this is hardly a milestone, but for me it was different. Because in the cafeteria, as young girls and boys on the cusp of truly beginning the transformation to women and men were drinking soda and awkwardly slow dancing, I finally overheard several of my fellow students talking about me behind my back. They were popular kids, people I knew, of course, but had not really formed any true connection to. Today, ten years later, I don't even remember their names. But I remember what one of them, a lovely young woman, said. "Jeff is pretty cool. He's different, yeah, but it doesn't drag him down. He's really meant for something."
As you do during puberty in this nation, I didn't ever confront them, or thank them. I went to the bathroom and cried in a stall. Finally I knew what it was to feel equal, to feel respected.
Since then, I have built a wonderful and wide network of friends here in Wisconsin that I hold so dear, I consider them on the level of family. Indeed, when all my plans for the future came crashing down around me over the last month and half, all my friends from all over reached out in different, small ways that together could certainly enable to stay here in this state. They offered me money, a car, jobs, a place to sleep, a life to continue to live. And again, like I did ten years ago, I realized what it is to be loved and respected by your peers. My friends did not mock me for failure, or accuse me of all my personal faults that have again brought me to this low point. They just laughed, in kindness and love, and offered me a helping hand. Yesterday was the celebration of Thanksgiving, and though I spit upon the historical context of the holiday, I assure you that I know what it is to be thankful. I am so eternally thankful for this, my friends, my family.
Still, I'm leaving. Physically, anyway. I have no real reason to anymore, but it still feels like what I must do. And why? That brings me to what happened tonight.

In fourth grade I was living in Berlin, Wisconsin, and was already deeply embroiled in my fascination with the immaterial, the imaginary. I understood, dimly, the concept of a roleplaying game, and had over the last two years made many attempts to emulate whatever it was that my child mind thought Dungeons and Dragons was. I encouraged my friends to "play pretend" with me, and created vast imaginary worlds all over the playground for us to cavort in. Already I was a storyteller. That Christmas, in fact, would be the year my parents (specifically, I believe, my father) would buy me the recently released "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Starter" boxed set. Tiny little purple miniatures, I am sure several of you remember it. But before that, around my birthday in October, was my first true roleplaying experience.
Sensing my love of acting, of stories, and noticing how close my birthday was to Halloween, my parents decided to do a "How to Host a Murder" for my birthday party. For those unfamiliar with the concept, each guest takes on a persona of a possible suspect in the murder of the party's fictional host, and you take it in loose turns to suss out information from each other before the big reveal of the true facts of the case at the party's end. Its rather like a more freeform, acting version of Clue.
My family and the families of the other children went the whole mile for me that year, creating costumes and turning our home into a place reminiscent of a haunted house. Today it amazes me that my parents did so much for me then, as at the time my mother was suffering from a debilitating illness that almost completely disconnected her from reality, and my father was forced to live several hours away to work his job which supported us, leaving the younger me to fend for my younger brother and myself. I am thankful they did, though, that they made punch complete with a frozen spooky hand of dry ice.
It was the first time I ever really pushed people to delve entirely into a fictional world, to participate with me in a story that wasn't their own, but that could belong to them if they so chose. It was a formative moment in my life.
This year, for my birthday, I wanted to relive in some small way that How to Host a Murder party of my youth. So I bought a boxed set, and began to organize the event to occur at the beginning of this month of November. Then my life and my plans quickly began to fall apart, and I became too overwhelmed to finish the invitations, the preparation.
Unbeknowst to me, my announcement of my imminent departure to my roommates inspired them to work even harder to make this moment of my childhood come alive again. Two groups of my friends, almost entirely unconnected to each other, coordinated and organized without my knowing. When I returned to my home in the Garden of Madness (our name for our house) here in Madison tonight, I was beset by a group of people in costumes who had prepared a dinner, music, and costumes for this event. They had even prepared a makeshift costume for me, immediately forcing me to dress in it.
We ate, we drank much wine, we suffered through terrible puns and crafted some of our own gleefully cheesy humor. We played pretend, as adults, with no hint of shame or hesitation. We reveled in a fictional unfolding mystery. I still intend to have a grand going away party, but this, I think, will be a memory that I will hold with me for my life. To think that people I feel like I am abandoning would go out of their way to create this experience for me... it brings me to tears.
All my life people have told me I am meant for something, that they sense it within me. And all my life it has frustrated myself and the people who love me when I fail to live up to my potential again, and again, and again. Always I've thought that "something" must mean something "real": a doctor, a politician, a lawyer, a writer of novels.
Now though, still tipsy on wine, drinking Earl Grey and smoking Arabic-coffee flavored hookah as I sit in warm blanket and cool darkness in my subterranean room, I look back on my life and see what it is truly building up to. I will never find my destiny being who I am not, for even if I am many things, what I am most is a gamer. I am one who, as Lovecraft coined, dwells ever apart in the realms invisible.
In more ancient ages I may have become a shaman, but in our modern era there is no word for this person who takes people into the immaterial world. The world of our imagination and subconscious, of our fears and hopes. Or perhaps there is a word for it. Perhaps "roleplayer" is the word now, "storyteller", "dungeonmaster", "gamer". The social stigma of these words has, largely, fallen away over the last two decades. Thanks to the prevalence of electronic gaming, the financial success of World and Warcraft, Second Life, and G4TV, gaming-chic has come into style.
More and more, we dwell in a world defined more by the human mind than by our environment. This is a trend that, barring apocalypse, I believe will continue. Yes, I do have it in me to become a lawyer, a politician, a doctor. But I would just be taking a role. I would just be playing pretend. If playing pretend is who I am, than so be it.
Watching an anime as I drank my tea and smoke my hookah, reflecting, a line stood out to me. "Trying your hardest to be something is a talent all in itself, don't you think?" Well, don't you? And I have certainly been trying. But I have been fighting who I am, fighting my destiny, trying to pigeonhole myself into a mainstream society that doesn't have a place for me. My destiny isn't there. It is in who I truly am. A gamer.

So, I am going to Portland. It is a kingdom of slackers and alternative lifestyles. Do not think I also don't see the reality of the situation, that it is a place of sloth and hedonism, that it is a real place and not some fictional paradise I have created in my head. It is just another place, with people. To quote another anime, "Wherever you go, people are people, and there is the sky." But also, the Pacific Northwest is where the grand majority of games electronic and paper-and-pencil are created today. And it is with those games that my future truly lies.

I will be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, a knight, a baron, a detective, an actor, a storyteller, a villain, a hero. I will be all these things, if only for a little while, and more than them.

Tonight I rededicate myself to my purpose in life, which I have been so reminded of tonight. I dedicate myself to transporting and transforming people to other worlds. To bringing fiction to life, and using it to teach lessons about nonfiction. To create feelings in people they are afraid to feel, and have them act out those same feelings in ways that some would say are "imaginary". In the moment, though, feelings are always real. They may fade and warp, but when you feel them that first time, they are true, and they teach you lessons you will never forget.

This, more than any other way, is how I have learned to help other people, and myself. And I excel at it. No longer will I reject my destiny.